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Irrigation For Crops: Changing With Passing Years
If you haven't noticed, plants and fruits contain about 85-95% water in their bodies. This is why crop irrigation or irrigation for that matter is important for your home garden or farm needs. In order to make sure that you get a good crop that is rich in nutrients you should keep in mind that plant irrigation is necessary as a plant yield can lose about 30% of its water within a short span of two to three days. Irrigation techniques are also employed in farm areas where the land receives less or no rainfall. Making right use of irrigation methods can help to decrease the damage caused to crops due to less water and thereby increase yield considerably.
In the yesteryears farmers sued to relay on hard labor to get water to their crops. This involved use of a bucket and frequent trips to a water reservoir and back to water plants and provide respite to the crops from the scorching sun. This task though it helped if you have a small farmland was not enough to take care of large expanses of farmland. In order to make sure that large expanses of land were watered regularly the concept of irrigation was revolutionized to a great extent.
Here are a few methods of irrigation that are used to help water large expanses of land.
- Flood irrigation techniques
Flood irrigation makes use of levels of lands and pumps to make sure that water is scattered over large expanses of land. These water surges are regulated to allow for controlled flooding wherein water is supplied to necessary areas. In such irrigation systems pumps are used to transport water from a reservoir to the farmland that is raised and enclosed by a dyke. This raise contour of land around the sides of land prevented loss of water from overflowing and allowed water to soak into the soil over a span of time.
In most cases this technique was used to a great advantage by farmers, but in most cases it couldn't be used due to wastage of water caused during evaporation. Farmers also found that usage of this method wasn't beneficial to plants as most of them did not get water if they weren't in the line of the flood region.
- Center pivot irrigation
Center pivot irrigation makes use of sprinkler heads and pipes to transport water to farms and fields and thereby provide essential amount of water for your crops. The center pivot has a working system that is similar to that of your garden sprinkling system. The center of a field contains the water source through which water is pumped and supplied to the ends of the fields through pipes that are hanging close to the plants or just above them. In this way one can sprinkle water at the base of the plants or on top of them thereby cutting down on wastage of water considerably.
The needs of farmers and of crop yields are driving forces which signal the need to change the type of irrigation being used. Depending on these needs one can envision that techniques will change so that farmers can benefit from the applications of these systems.